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Monday, 5 January 2015

Well, 2014 turned out to be quite a year. For me, it was a really productive one, and I was lucky enough to get the opportunity to work on some great projects. Below are a few personal highlights that I've put together as a sort of 'year in review', along with a list of notable stories and developments in the realm of surveillance and national security, some 'ones to watch' for 2015, and a few awards that I've decided to hand out for dishonourable government conduct, just because there was so much of it over the last twelve months, and the worst offenders deserve some recognition...

(I meant to post this last week, but I've been on a remote Spanish island
on holiday with no internet connection... so here it is, better late than never...)

January to March

In January I worked with Canadian broadcaster CBC to reveal details about domestic surveillance in the Canada. In February, The Intercept launched, and I contributed to a story that revealed some new details about US and UK government efforts to target WikiLeaks. In March, I had a report out shining a light on how the US National Security Agency has worked alongside its UK partner Government Communication Headquarters to infect large numbers of computers across the world with malware. I also worked on a story exposing the NSA's targeting of innocent system administrators as part of its covert attempts to hack into communication networks.

April to June

In March, I worked with German news magazine Der Spiegel on a story revealing new details about the NSA's surveillance of world leaders. In April, I reported on British spies' attempts to get broad unsupervised access into NSA troves of surveillance data. And in June, I worked with some great reporters at Danish newspaper Dagbladet Information to reveal new information showing how the NSA forms secret partnerships with countries across the world in order to help significantly expand its surveillance reach.

July to September

In August, the US military banned its personnel from reading The Intercept, and a few days later we published one of the most important stories I've worked on to date, exposing a vast US surveillance search system used to share huge troves of private data among dozens of US government agencies, including domestic law enforcement. The story revealed the decades-long history of US agencies' use of masses of metadata to monitor people's behaviour, and exposed how the CIA was using metadata to aid its efforts to secretly kidnap terror suspects (a practice that often resulted in the suspects — some of whom were totally innocent — being brutally tortured).

In September, we began reporting details at The Intercept about the scope of surveillance in New Zealand, and shined a light on deceptive statements made by the government there about its spying efforts; meanwhile, police raided and ransacked the home of the excellent investigative reporter that we were (and are) working with on Snowden revelations related to New Zealand.

October to December

In November, I worked on a story revealing how one of the most sophisticated pieces of malware ever discovered — dubbed "Regin" by security experts — was linked to cyberattacks perpetrated by British spies against Belgian telecommunications company Belgacom and European Union offices. This piece was an interesting one to work on in that it combined both news reportage with malware analysis — something that's never been done before in journalism, I think — and was published alongside downloadable samples of the Regin malware.

In December, I had a new report out revealing a secret NSA program that involves spying on emails sent among hundreds of mobile phone companies around the world, a practice that helps the agency hack into phone networks. The story exposed how the NSA targeted a London-headquartered trade group that represents tech giants like Microsoft and Facebook, and provided evidence that NSA had been working to insert security vulnerabilities into global telecommunications infrastructure so that they can be exploited for surveillance.

Also in December, I reported new details about the GCHQ hack of Belgian telecommunications company Belgacom as part of a reporting collaboration with newspapers in Belgium and the Netherlands. This particular story is one that I am especially proud of; it was the culmination of about six months of work, and took a huge amount of cooperation with different teams operating out of four separate countries simultaneously. We were able to tell the full story of the British hack on Belgacom, a hugely significant incident representing an unprecedented cyberattack by one EU member state on another. The story included new 'smoking gun' evidence showing that the Regin malware samples contained code-names that also appeared in secret GCHQ documents obtained from whistleblower Edward Snowden.

Winner: Recently retired GCHQ spy chief Sir Iain Lobban for his claim in October thatthe agency doesn't engage in "anything remotely resembling mass surveillance." A completely false statement that could not be further from the truth.

UK foreign secretary Philip Hammond, who is responsible for signing off on GCHQ surveillance operations, illustrates that he doesn't have a clue what he's been approving during a parliamentary hearing in October.

Hypocrite of the year

Michael Hayden, the CIA chief who overseen the agency's secret extrajudicial kidnapping operations that involved imprisoning and torturing terrorism suspects, some of whom were entirely innocent, complains in December that a Senate report criticising CIA torture methods was like being "tried and convicted in absentia. We were not given an opportunity
to mount a defense."

A special joint award that goes to the Canadian prime minister's parliamentary secretary, Paul Calandra, and John Key, New Zealand's prime minister. Instead of addressing the substance of revelations about secret government spying in 2014 (that I was involved in reporting), Calandra and Key both resorted to weird and childish petty insults, calling my colleague Glenn Greenwald a "porn spy" (Calandra) and a "loser" (Key).